We read in ARA Balears a testimony of this extraordinary series, My School Years
, which reconstructs, decade by decade, the school of those of us who are adults today, with teachers who no longer exist. Antoni Vidal, born in 1963, says: “A classmate with a facial deformity, who spoke with difficulty, was ridiculed by the director in front of the whole class. He asked him if he had finished selling coupons. No one laughed. The silence was more eloquent than any laughter.”
I looked closely, some time ago, at Goya's painting – today in the Palau de l'Aljaferia – called La letra con sangre entra, because I am convinced that no, no, it does not enter with blood. Letters only come out with blood. It is a desolate painting, which conveys dirt, disorder, pain, and which explains those who justify or justified physical punishment. One of the stories that has impressed me most in my life is Galloping Foxley
, by Roald Dahl, about the abuse of older students towards younger ones. In real life, I met a teacher who humiliated some female students. How easy it is to humiliate children and adolescents, right? How cheap. I said something to that woman: “You don't think about it now, but these girls will one day be women, and these women will never forget you.”
There is something in the testimony we are considering, however, that has made me think. There was no laughter, he says. There was an eloquent and brave silence. I am not entirely sure that this, the absence of laughter, the quiet complicity, the solidarity of one's peers, would happen everywhere today. Perhaps today no teacher would laugh at anyone's physical appearance, but I am not sure that some classmates wouldn't laugh, with the complicity or connivance of some of their parents. The private jokes of those who complain that nothing can be said now, how frightening they are, because they always go in one direction: physical appearance.
